After Lehman Bros., mine disaster, BP oil spill, John Kasich still believes that big business should be trusted to self-regulate

According to the April 6th, 2010 edition of the Marion Star, John Kasich told a crowd at the Crawford County Republican Party dinner his vision of how government should regulate businesses:

“…[G]et some business people in who will be driving the regulations so we have common sense.”

In John Kasich’s world, business people should drive the regulations that government enforces against them. Seriously. Kasich said that to a partisan dinner crowd right around the time a massive explosion killed 25 miners in West Virginia at a mine rife with lax safety and flaunting of safety regulations. 25 miners killed in what some believed would have been a preventable accident had the mine operater not taken a hostile view of such “lacking common sense” federal safety regulations like a ventilation systems that actually worked. (Murray Energy, which has its own history of numerous and substantial safety violations has donated $10,000 to the Kasich-Taylor campaign.)

Did you hear about how in 2002 BP’s risk managers wrote a memo themed after the “Three Little Pigs” that concluded that a cost-benefit analysis determined that it wasn’t cost-efficient to build a blast-resistant structures on offshore oil rigs to house workers. Three years later, five Texas workers died in a more flimsy structure during a rig explosion plagued with regulatory safety violations.

John Kasich went from repeal Glass-Stegal in Congress to working for Lehman Bros.– thus giving him luxury box, front-row seats to Ground Zero of our near global meltdown. He emerged from the rubble of Lehman Bros., snagged a half a million dollar bonus check before his employer headed to bankruptcy court, then dusted himself off to run for Governor in Ohio on a platform to “get some business people in who will be driving the regulations.” It’s an amazing case of stubborness despite all evidence to the contrary of your world view.

Ebenezer Scrooge was quicker to see the errors of his ways.

If there was any person in American who could see the folly of trusting big business to self-regulate, you’d think it would be John Kasich. It’s not out of bounds to ask, it’s not partisan hyperbole to ask, how many Ohioans is John Kasich willing to sacrifice at the alter of appeasement to Big Business?

After all, here’s a live testament of John Kasich’s glorious regulatory vision: